


Over the line

by rivkat



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Eight crazy nights, Gen, Judaism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-06
Updated: 2012-08-06
Packaged: 2017-11-11 13:40:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/479133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rivkat/pseuds/rivkat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>for cellia: I wonder if there's a fanon explanation for why Buffy vamps seem to only react to crosses and holy water.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Over the line

**Author's Note:**

> Ignores much comics canon because honestly, I have no idea what’s going on there.

“Do you ever wonder why only crosses work on vamps?” Buffy twirled her necklace between her fingers. She’d never developed the nervous habit of playing with it, but plenty of the new Slayers had. “Why not, you know, stars of Donald or whatever it is that Buddhists would use?”  
  
“Stars of David,” Willow corrected, not unkindly. “And yes, the thought has occasionally crossed my mind. A couple of years before Sunnydale died, I did some research on it.”  
  
Buffy waited. Willow’s eyes got that far-away, recite-y look. “A powerful anti-Semitic witch did a spell. Did a number on Muslim slayers too—I found out later there was this one who nearly got killed twenty years back because she had a cross on her—but it was designed to make it harder for the Jews in the ghetto near her to fight off the vampires who were killing everyone they could find. Vampires couldn’t get through the eruv, which is basically a string that makes a whole place count as a home. The Jews were protected better than anyone else. So she thought that they were in league with the vampires. Actually Jews have often been depicted as vampires, historically. Parasites on the productive classes and all that. But she stripped their protections away, and they died along with everyone else.”  
  
Hunh. That was pretty terrible. Buffy knew that humans could be as awful as monsters, but it sucked to have it shoved in her face. “Can you fix it?” Buffy asked.  
  
“No,” Willow said, then, “Maybe. I couldn’t when I did the research, so I sort of put it out of my mind. But now?” She was silent for a moment. “Hate is so powerful, Buff.”  
  
“Yeah,” Buffy said, sitting down next to Willow so she could throw her arm around her friend. “But so are we.”


End file.
